Out of the blue - an epic, sorry

[abeautifulbutterfly]

I'm pushing 40 and I have just (like 2 days ago) found out I have an older half-sibling (let's call this sibling Kim) who was adopted shortly after birth. It seems there were no plans for me to know about Kim, even though my mum and Kim did regain contact when Kim came of age. They were in relatively close touch for some years and then something went wrong and Kim broke off contact. My mum still has amicable contact with Kim's birth father (who still has contact with Kim) so she keeps abreast of Kim's life, though she seems to be very traumatised about the way things turned out - she thought they were building a relationship, she hoped she be present in Kim's life in some way and then she received cuttings of interviews Kim had given that said unpleasant things about her... Whatever, I don't know and may never know what it was all about.
Fast forward 15 years (since last direct contact between mum and Kim) and Kim makes contact with my sister on FB and threatened to make the story public on her FB page if she didn't go to our mum to find out who Kim was (Kim knew about us all the time, though my father had insisted we not be informed about Kim) and the story has come out.

I feel terribly for Kim, who was treated like a shameful secret for so long. I also feel for my mum, who was forced to give up her baby, then, having regained contact, lost it again, and has now been kind of steamrollered into telling us. I am having trouble condoning her lack of moral backbone and not standing up to all the men in her life who forced her into this situation in the first place, or at least not telling us once she freed herself of them, but she has been to hell and back and is not very emotionally strong, so I am trying to understand this.

I would love to have contact with Kim (an older sibling from nowhere!) and my mum has nothing against it but I really want to help mum too. She says she doesn't know how to proceed - she had trained herself to live with what she calls three sets of emotions (the humiliation she suffered as an unmarried mother in the 60s, the loss of her much-loved baby and loneliess and sadness afterwards, and then the contact and loss of it again) and didn't want to return. But I can't see how I can have contact with Kim if she doesn't. And it looks like Kim wants some kind of contact with us - why now? And why through FB? - so sooner or later I guess we will get in touch. Mum has never had counselling - wasn't offered any back then, and now is unwilling to open up old wounds as for the first time in her life she is/was on a relatively even keel, in retirement. But I don't see how she can cope with this otherwise.

If anyone has read to the end of this epic please help me to do the right thing for all of us...

I would think that you mother would like contact with Kim again but is afraid of being rejected or hurt again. I would say that whatever Kim has said in the past she does want contact with her birth family but has a lot of anger and hurt about the adoption. However, I would also say that both of them and you and your sister would probably benefit from taking advice from a professional and taking it very slowly.

Why don't you feel that you can have a realationship with Kim if your Mum doesn't?

I think that if YOU want to have a relationship with Kim go ahead. (You do also have your mums Ok on this as well.)

Also, I think the best thing to help your Mum would probably be some counselling, can any be arranged now?
I think her not knowing how to proceed. is something that may be resolved with counselling, as she unravels her feelings about the whole thing.

Other than that I don't what else to say, just follow your gut instinct with it all!

Maybe just start off with sending a letter to Kim and go on from there, and take your time with it, so you are comfortable with the situation.

I told my mum that I think counselling would help but it was then that she said she really is unwilling to open it all up.
But I asked her what would happen if Kim and my sister wanted to meet up with her there, what would she do? And she said she would go. I'm not sure this would happen (my sister is far less happy with the idea than me, having been threatened with some unknown scandal story by some unknown person) but I wanted to see how opposed to regaining contact she was.
My mum is a very private person, worries terribly about what other people think, analyses everything from a million different angles (what did x mean when she said that?...)
I thik there is a lot of anger, hurt and rejection on both sides.
I thought of suggesting to my mum that she should write down the whole story on paper and then send it to me to keep. Then she has kind of got it out of her system, got it out of her house, but if she does decide to go for counselling I could give it her back and she could have the counsellor read the story instead of having to tell it all again, and maybe deal with talking about it to a stranger bit by bit, tackling what she feels she can tackle first (she was hysterical when she was telling me, we were both sobbing).

Writing it down sounds like a good idea, cathartic for her and she could take her time to tell the story which might make it easier for you to get to grips with it.

I agree though that you could make contact with Kim without involving your mother at the start. You might meet her and then decide you don't want to develop a relationship with her, for example. Would be better for your mother in that case if she was not involved, iyswim.

This seems a little like this story:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/974277-to-have-told-a-young-woman-she- 39-s-actually

It's great that you want to make contact with her. I would find it difficult to discover this news through facebook personally.

Please can you post that link again? It didn't work and I would be interested to read it. This is all very new to me and I am a bit shellshocked, though kind of excited I have a kind of new sibling, which I always wanted. I have not had any contact either with Kim or my sister yet (my sister and I are not in touch, through my sister's choice) and I live abroad, so my mum waited to tell me face to face until she came to see me.
I am a regular but namechanged because my talk name is a bit like my real name and I don't know if anyone involved uses MN, though I have changed names and a few minor details so as not to unwitingly out anyone.

Does this work?

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/974277-to-have-told-a-young-woman-she-3 9-s-actually

If not then if you got to Advanced Search - type in

Adoption facebook

Choose the topic Am I being unreasonable

OK - just got the link to work. Thanks.
Whoa! This looks pretty similar to the situation I am in though it's not ours. To tell the truth I think FB for things like that is a very bad idea and I can see why my Mum and sister are angry about the way this was done. I have the comfort of being the only one who is in control of the situation(besides Kim, who evidently has anger and rejection issues which I have the luxury of not having).
The only reason I was worried about having contact with Kim without my mum's involvement is because she will feel very insecure. I would also hate Kim to twist anything I say to damage my mum again (and TBH she has form in that respect if I am to believe the mag interview part of what mum told me).

OK, have to log off now and do some work but will be back tomorrow... Any other suggestions of how to proceed with all this will be gratefully received (bearing in mind that it will probably have to be mum that puts us in touch, as my name has changed by marriage, so I won't be as easily traceable as my sister).

I have found her profile on FB but am not going to do it that way. To me FB is def. not the forum for delicate matters like this. If she contacts me through FB then OK, but I'm not going to initiate it.

After a lot of talking, Mum has said she'll go back to the professional contact she has at the adoption agency (?), and talk it through with the woman who is on their case. She doesn't want to go for counselling - has had lots of it for other issues and thinks it's not the way to go.

I told her, fwiw, that I would love to get to know my half-sister, though we both doubt it will be any kind of close friendship. I want this woman to know that, whatever my parents decided, it was not my decision (my father refused to let us be told, and then Kim broke off contact with my mother so my mother tried to put the whole thing behind her). I think she must be feeling a lot of anger and hurt so while I don't condone the things she's done, I think they're motivated by those emotions.

So to sum up I'm going to wait and see what happens. Going through Kim's birth father, btw, is not an option. I don't know him personally, only know of him through what Mum has told me, and tbh he sounds like a complete dick (quite literally - most of his life seems to be ruled by the fact that he can't keep said organ in its place...)

this all sounds a bit odd. And tbh it sounds to me as if there is more to this that your mum isn't telling you.

Who is this Kim woman - is she some celeb? Because if not, how is she going to make anything public and bring scandal on to your mother - sure she might have given a magazine interview but so what? Thousands of children were adopted in the 60's, I'm sure a large proportion of the mothers didn't tell their other children (although I can't say I agree with that), "my mother gave me up for adoption and didn't tell her other children" isn't exactly going to make the headlines or bring scandal on to the family, is it?

Or is her birth father a celebrity?

So while I think your mother would certainly benefit from some counselling I would also be asking her just what it is this Kim is going to scandalize her with, seeing as you can't see how giving up a baby is that much of a scandal.

Tbh she sounds very bitter. And I would hazard a guess that perhaps it was your mum's refusal to tell you about her that caused the rift, rather than anything she necessarily did, hence why she is hitting back now.

But it does sound as if there are other things your mum is still not telling you, and I would be looking for answers from her rather than looking for a relationship with a sibling who is unlikely to become a signifficant part of your life.

No they are not celebs, any of them. Only Kim lives in a small village very near to where all the rest of my mum's family live (who don't know about the whole thing), and when she gave this interview, which I gather was more a "human interest" thing than a rake-up of scandal, she didn't bother changing anyone's names, including that of my mother, yet it was a local paper.

Yes, I know that she probably did it to get back at my mum for not telling us, though the falling out between them came several years earlier, at a time when our family was in the middle of my father's affair, my parents' divorce (which my sister needed counselling for anyway) and my A-levels, and my mother at that point refused to tell us because she believed that esp. my sister wouldn't handle any more stress. After that, when Kim stopped contacting her, she decided to let it go, I gather. And then a few years on she received these cuttings from the paper from delightful birth father (why he sent them to her anyway is beyond me - had they been flattering or at least neutral, OK, but as I understand it they were all negative about my mother).

As for the FB thing and my sister - my sister is not a celeb either, but was worried someone was trying to blackmail her about something before she knew what was going on. Her career has brought her into contact with the wrong end of various foreign organisations of dubious legality and she was worried that it was a veiled threat of some sort.

Anyhow, I have left this all with mum, I am not going to contact Kim myself. Mum is going to talk again with the counsellor from the adoption organisation and probably attempt to talk things through again with Kim or at least write to her. She has no problem with us having contact, but I would be happier for her if they could try again themselves before I get involved. No, of course I don't need a relationship with a half-sister I never even knew I had, but I am curious to know her (she has kids around the same age as mine - one of them even looks a little like one of mine), and maybe she really does want to know us - else why would she be in touch suddenly after so many years?